What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all. - Anton Chekhov

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know — which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.

Мысль и красота, подобно урагану и волнам, не должны знать привычных, определенных форм.